As 12-year-old Sunny discovers she’s a Leopard Person with magical powers and is inducted into Leopard society, she’s struck by how much emphasis Leopard society places on the role of education. On the whole, Akata Witch explores how education can give a person power and push them to value selfless endeavors over selfish pursuits—and what the consequences of forsaking education can be. Within the Leopard world and the logic of the novel, knowledge and education are extremely important. Leopard currency, chittim, falls from the sky when people earn it, and they earn it through learning. Not all learning is created equal (Sunny and her friends, for instance, earn different amounts of chittim for mastering new juju charms, working together as a team, and uncovering new aspects of their identities), but the fact that Leopard People earn chittim for these very different kinds of lessons highlights the importance of being a lifelong learner. Indeed, Orlu explains to Sunny that the most powerful person in Nigerian Leopard society, Sugar Cream, is the elderly Head Librarian at the Obi Library—she’s powerful because she’s dedicated her life to learning and then to protecting the library, which contains the collective knowledge of West African Leopard People.
But while Leopard society frames acquiring knowledge as a noble endeavor, the novel also features several characters who use their status and education to selfishly enrich themselves. Two scholars, Madame Koto and Ibrahim Ahmed, immediately strike Sunny as corrupt: while they’ve both passed the fourth (most advanced) level of Leopard education, they’re also both powerful in the Lamb (nonmagical) world and have made fortunes in the oil industry. As scholars, they’re supposed to serve the Leopard community exclusively—but Sunny infers that their loyalty to Leopard society may be questionable, due to their dealings in oil. The novel’s primary antagonist, Black Hat Otokoto, takes this idea one step further. Like Madame Koto and Ibrahim Ahmed, he passed the fourth level—but he’s described as greedy, power-hungry, and downright evil. Black Hat Otokoto kidnaps children and mutilates them, the ultimate goal being to bring the dangerous and evil masquerade Ekwensu from the spirit world and allow her to destroy the physical world. Ultimately, though Otokoto does bring Ekwensu through, his power, education, and selfishness cause him to underestimate Sunny and her friends when they’re sent to thwart him. The novel implies that the kids might not be as knowledgeable as Otokoto, but their commitment to using their education for good to help Leopard society allows them to triumph. Education, this shows, gives a person power—but each person must choose whether to use what they’ve learned to serve others or fall prey to corruption.
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Education, Power, and Corruption Quotes in Akata Witch
“But I can tell there’s more to you. I just know it.”
“What do you mean, more?”
Chichi smiled mysteriously. “People say stuff about people like you. That you’re all ghost, or a half and half, one foot in this world and one foot in another.” She paused. “That you can…see things.”
Sunny rolled her eyes. Not this again, she thought. So cliché. Everyone thinks the old lady, the hunchback, the crazy man, and the albino have magical evil powers. “Whatever,” she grumbled. She didn’t want to think about the candle.
Chichi laughed. “You’re right, those are silly stereotypes about albinos. But in your case, I think there’s something to it.”
Her father believed that all one needed to succeed in life was an education. He had gone to school for many years to become a barrister, and then gone on to be the most successful child in his family. Sunny’s mother was an MD, and often talked about how excelling in school had opened opportunities to her that girls only two decades before didn’t normally get. So Sunny believed in education, too. But here was Chichi’s mother, surrounded by the hundreds of books she’d read, living in a decrepit old mud hut with her daughter.
“If not for Sunny, we wouldn’t have come today.”
“Things have a way of working themselves out,” Anatov said. “It’s as I taught you: the world is bigger and more important than you.”
“Money and material things make you king or queen of the Lamb world. You can do no wrong, you can do anything.
“Leopard People are different. The only way you can earn chittim is by learning. The more you learn, the more chittim you earn. Knowledge is the center of all things. The Head Librarian of the Obi Library of Leopard Knocks is the keeper of the greatest stock of knowledge in West Africa.”
“Knowledge does not always evolve into wisdom.”
“If you’d have all perished, we’d have found you and your bodies would have been returned to your parents with…explanation,” Kehinde said.
Sunny’s mouth fell open. What kind of barbaric coldhearted man was this?
“Come now,” Kehinde said, pulling out a newspaper. He shook it at them. “Have you seen the news lately? If you haven’t noticed, a person’s life, especially a young person’s, isn’t worth much these days. The world is bigger than all of you. Chances have to be taken. But thankfully, here you are.”
“Teamwork is the only reason you four lived to see Kehinde,” Anatov said. “There are seriously unsafe places in Leopard Knocks. Places where people try to steal chittim instead of earning it. Where they have forgotten why they receive chittim in the first place. Knowledge is more valuable than the chittim it earns.”
“The second and third are the university, for true scholars. Third levelers, Ndibus, who want to keep evolving.”
“My mother goes there,” Chichi said proudly. “She’s one of the younger students, though.”
“Younger?” Chichi’s mother was about her mother’s age.
“It’s not like with Lambs,” Orlu said. “Age is one of the requirements to even start at the Obi University of Pre-Scholars. You have to be over forty-two.”
“Listen. It was your grandmother, Ozoemena, who taught Otokoto all he knows. She was his mentor. And it was Otokoto who killed your grandmother in a ritual to steal her abilities as he stole her life. You want to know why he is so powerful? All you need to look at is who your grandmother was and who Otokoto was before he became the infamous Black Hat.”
“You’re neck-deep in Leopard society right now. The good thing is that it doesn’t get any deeper than this. Sometimes it’s best to just jump in. Then, after that first shock, you can handle anything.”
“Yeah,” she said, wiping her eyes again. “I—I got my juju knife today, too.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. He looked down at her. “Use it well and true. There are more valuable things in life than safety and comfort. Learn. You owe it to yourself. All this”—he motioned around them—“you’ll get used to in time.”
“How many chittim fell when it was over?”
“Seven coppers,” Orlu mumbled. “We could have gotten people killed and we got paid for it.”
“As a group you made a mistake and you learned you could also right it,” Anatov said.
“No one is willing to push the envelope. So what if she called up a damn Mmuo Aku and it went wild! She still did it! She still performed the most sophisticated juju any of them had ever seen.”
“True, but you’re wrong,” Orlu said. “We can’t live in chaos. The ages are set for each level for a reason. You can be able to do something and not be mature enough to deal with the consequences.”
“You’ve made good progress, Sunny,” Anatov said.
“Thanks.”
“What I’d like you to think about, though, is who you are. Because within that knowledge is the key to how much you can learn.”
She frowned, thinking about what had just happened with her mother. “Oga,” she whispered, “these days I don’t really think I know who I am.” Anatov was silent. “What do you know of my grandmother? Who was she?”
Sunny frowned. “You mean you’ve sent other groups like ours? And—”
“We have and will continue to until Black Hat is taken down,” Yaboko said. “More is at stake than your lives.”
“Black Hat is a shrewd sorcerer,” Abok said. “He has protection, but we have watched for loopholes. The children that returned maimed but alive were all rescued by Oha covens.”
“Did the rescuers escape, too?” she asked.
None of the scholars replied. That was answer enough.
“You come any closer and you’ll ruin what’s already in motion. Then I’ll have to slaughter you two instead of just these children. Get outside,” Black Hat said. Then he seemed to be speaking to someone else. “You all may leave, too. These kids are harmless. Go watch for real threats,” he said. All the commotion and squawking behind Sunny instantly stopped as the bush souls obeyed.
“Grandma,” she whispered. As the old blind woman at the council meeting had said, Sunny looked nothing like her. But what did that matter? She smiled to herself and carefully put the picture back in the box.
